Shoeboxed v Receipt Bank: here’s what you should know plus some big surprises

I love running the agile ship that is Conversant Media. One thing which really excites me about my role is improving our business processes. As an execution business, it’s these things which sets us apart from the more long-in-the-tooth media entities. And improving process often means automating it.

So I was excited to hear about businesses using Shoeboxed for processing their invoices into XERO.

As the Conversant team know all too well, Fridays I’m often bunkered down doing accounts. Using XERO and having a great bookkeeper and accountant helps, but I reckon I still spend too long on accounts. My Board have told me this enough times in case I was in any doubt.

The Shoeboxed service offered the prospect of freeing up my Fridays a little.

Using their service, you send them your invoice (by taking a photo of your receipt using a smart phone, or forwarding the email containing the receipt, or even posting the invoice to them using neat envelops they provide).

Then in theory they do the heavy lifting for you: parsing the receipt for information and providing it in a form for your review. From there you can then post this invoice direct to XERO’s accounting system.

Sounds pretty sweet. I was excited.

I always research other options for potential tools to use in our business, so I did some research and trialled Receipt Bank at the same time.

My experience with both services was mixed, but I’ve come out of the process with a firm conclusion: if you’re a small business with medium complexity using XERO, it’s unlikely you’ll benefit much from either of these services.

In fact, it’s my view you really shouldn’t use either of them.

Here’s why.

The following are the limitations I experienced using both Receipt Bank and Shoeboxed.

Limitations of Shoeboxed

The actual receipts aren’t sent to XERO (they are linked from XERO)

From an implementation approach this isn’t clever and was a showstopper for me. It effectively means you are highly coupled with Shoeboxed. A core concept of system usage is loose coupling. You really don’t want your accounting system being coupled to an invoice process tool. They should be easily changed with minimal bindings between the systems. Your source of truth should be your accounting system. So the invoices should naturally reside there. By leaving them with Shoeboxed, you also run the risk if the service is closed down (or worse), then your receipts and their fate lie out of your hands.

The files aren’t secure – your data is in the open

When linking the receipt from XERO, Shoeboxed puts an obscured link to the file which itself is not secured. It’s hard to find…but not secure. And obscurity is not security. Again, a showstopper for me. Invoices contain sensitive information and shouldn’t be public.

Shoeboxed does not accept .doc files

Our business is sent most invoices in this file-format. Why oh why can’t they process this file format in the age of online cloud storage (which has long overcome the potential security risks with a .doc format)?

The value ad of the processing is low

The processing of data in my trial was OK at best. I often had to enrich, change due dates, and company names, and so on. This is all these guys should do well and they don’t do it. It’s a problem given XERO makes it so easy to enter a receipt already, especially given their new Files release.

System uptime and transparency weren’t great

When I signed up to Shoeboxed, my emails forwarding receipts were never processed (or even bounced back – they just disappeared). It took two days and four phone calls to get a single file processed. Their help desk was superb when I spoke to them, but they did inform me they were experiencing a large system outage over the past week. My problem was that they didn’t inform me – the customer – about this. No tweets. No system status pages. Nothing. This concerned me as it felt like they weren’t being transparent about their issues – a big deal if you trust them with your business documents.

To be fair, Shoeboxed does support multiple Xero accounts reasonably well and the people I spoke to in Australia have been great. But the limitations above are, in my view, enough raise real doubts about using the service if you’re serious about your business.

Limitations of Receipt Bank

Receipt Bank does not support multiple XERO accounts

I had to create separate Receipt Bank accounts with various email addresses and login/out each time to process invoices for the two business entities we ran. If you run multiple XERO entities, this is a showstopper. (Oddly though its iPhone app does support multiple accounts.)

Receipt Bank service not enter the invoice’s specified due date

Again – a showstopper for me. When I enter a payable into XERO I want to know when the supplier is asking for the money to be paid. This helps me manage their expectations and my cashflow. But Receipt Bank just adds ‘x’ days to each invoice (where you specify the ‘x’). Not good enough in my view given this is pretty much one of the key bits of information in a receipt.

Receipt Bank does not accept .doc files – just like Shoeboxed.

While Receipt Bank does actually post files to XERO directly, it stores documents in an image format rather than PDF (which would contain the text it parsed out in the first place).

The security issues and lack of .doc file formats are real showstoppers for me.

But more broadly, I do wander what led both companies to the position they are today: where the core of their offering (processing invoices and extracting data) is a small and arguably poor part of their service.

8 Comments

Thanks for taking the time to trial Receipt Bank. We are working with thousands of businesses to solve these problems and all feedback is really useful to us. Your point about .doc files is a good one. Although they contribute only a small minority of invoices and receipts (the vast majority today are either paper or various forms of pdf) they are still important for some businesses and I’m pleased to be able to report that we will soon be able to support them.

Thank you also for your other points – we are always looking to improve and will have a look to see if these are areas that we can easily add to the product and hence the user experience.

RT

I’ve used Shoeboxed for two years. As soon as Xero supports adding expenses (along with their images via mobile), I’ll be gone.

It’s true:

– You end up correcting so much that it makes more sense to attach the image in Xero and enter the details yourself. Transcription is rarely accurate or complete.
– Shoeboxed has had a number of system problems since late 2013. Website issues, glitches with mobile, etc.
– The linking / importing is helpful if you already use Shoeboxed but cumbersome and scary. You end up double-checking the synced items anyway.
– Viewing the attachment in Xero natively is clearly faster (and safer).

Thanks for the write-up Zac. I totally agree.

Zac

RT – just so you know, XERO does indeed support adding expenses via mobile (including images). I use it on iPhone and there’s an Android version (though this is quite poorly executed – it simply doesn’t save data quite frequently and we’ve replicated this on numerous devices).

Great blog Zac. Thanks for the comparison. We are using Receipt Bank and I am surprised by the jpg import. Why not PDF? Due date is big as well. Whoever gets this stuff right first is likely to win many customers.

Alastair Wilkie

I have been trialling Entryless as an alternative to receipt Bank and shoeboxed. I would be interested to hear your comments … I have found that it has some imperfections but it certainly ticks a lot of the boxes you say the others don’t..

Zac

Matt

We have developed a solution that imports pdfs invoices into xero or any accounting solution, .docs would be no issue to do either. If you are interested in discussing, email me at matthew@pdftransfer.com